Pop CSI: How Science Conquered TV

At the most basic level, ER refo-cused the medical drama from patients to practitioners, explains Neal Baer, who wrote for ER after getting his medical degree at Harvard. But what that meant in practice was that characters spoke in authentic (and often incomprehensibly technical) jargon and spent significant screen time dwelling on the details of diagnosis and treatment. Astonishingly, viewers lapped it up. â€Viewers like to be taken to a place they´ve never been before,†Baer says. â€ER had cultural minutiae that were very flavorful and fresh.†(Heaping helpings of George Clooney presumably didn´t hurt.) And in a departure from then-standard
television-production practice, the details were supplied by a writing staff studded with actual doctors, beginning with lapsed M.D. Michael Crichton.

ER showed that you could play to an audience´s intellect-cram a procedural drama with accurate and arcane science and technobabble-and flourish. Then, in 2000, something happened that seems to have convinced television producers not only that they could do such a thing, but that they must. CSI happened. On most police series, the forensics guy would pop in, make a dark joke about the dead, and leave, his experiments kept largely offscreen. CSI put the lab work up front-and it became a runaway number-one blockbuster. Its success (today it reaches more than 20 million viewers) sent scientific seismic waves through the business. CSI spawned Miami and New York clones, and other shows immediately began to amp up their scientific bona fides. Law & Order: SVU, which Baer now runs, took its psychologist and coroner characters from the margins and made them central to every episode.

Six seasons later, science has made a nearly complete transition from stumbling block to selling point, says David Stapf, the president of CBS Paramount Network Television, the studio that makes Numb3rs and CSI. â€We hear pitches all day long that 10 years ago I would have said, â€Is that sexy enough?´ Back then, somebody in a lab coat didn´t seem like someone interesting.†Now the sexy icons of prime time are more likely to wear lab coats than swimsuits.

This fall, when the slick new Ray Liotta thief show Smith was euthanized after just three episodes, CBS replaced it with 3lbs, a series about a neurosurgeon (played by Stanley Tucci). 3lbs creator Peter Ocko speaks passionately about how central science is to his show´s appeal: â€We found in our testing that CSI changed the demographic. People have become very science-literate, and they expect to learn something when they watch TV. They say, â€Hey, a brain show! I´d love to learn about being a brain surgeon.´ †To ensure that what we learn is accurate, Ocko employs two full-time researchers and has a neurosurgeon adviser on the set.

Which raises the obvious question: Why bother? Of all the people who watch 3lbs, the vast majority know exactly squat about brain surgery. In a couple dozen interviews this fall, I posed the â€why bother†question to TV veterans, whose answers all played around a similar theme. As House creator David Shore put it, â€If the science is wrong, we lose all credibility, and we´ve got no show.â€

Set walls are thin, Neal Baer points out, and if somehow the camera were to catch the thin edge of the set or expose the bare plywood on the back side, the audience would stop suspending disbelief. It´s the same with thin science writing. Hollywood television writers credit the American public with good noses for sniffing out baloney. So the science must also look and sound real. â€You don´t want to give them a line like, â€There´s an aberration in the flux modulator,´ †says Hart Hanson, the creator of Bones.